Valley veterans referred to other clinics

WASILLA — The struggling Veterans Administration clinic in Wasilla is without a doctor, though it does have a nurse practitioner and is sending excess patients to the Benteh Nuutah Valley Native Primary Care Center.

The VA had three doctors at the clinic until recently.

“The three positions that were all out there they were all contracted, local contracted and their contracts expired and they were given the option to extend,” Samuel Hudson, Public Affairs Officer with the VA said.

Those doctors chose not to extend their contracts.

Hudson said that the VA has been advertising for some time to try and hire two permanent doctors for the clinic.

“We have been advertising consistently for the last couple of years and we have offered positions to providers and they have for whatever (reason) declined them,” Hudson said.

The Wasilla clinic in particular was singled out for extra scrutiny earlier this year when Sen. Lisa Murkowski managed to get a senate committee to order an investigation into the clinic. The facility has been chronically understaffed leading to numerous complaints.

The extra scrutiny comes as, nationwide, the VA has come under fire for the quality of care it provides veterans as it struggles to keep up with a surge of patients coming home from America’s wars abroad.

In wondering aloud why the VA has struggled to find providers for Mat-Su, Murkowski has pointed to the success of the Southcentral Foundation — which runs the Valley Native Primary Care Center — as an organization that has been successful recruiting doctors to work in the Alaska, even in areas of the state much more remote than Mat-Su.

Hudson said that the VA has contracted with recruitment firms to try to find doctors and is also offering incentives like tuition forgiveness.

“We are aggressively looking at trying to hire,” he said.

To that end, the VA announced this week that it will increase its maximum rates for in-coming Veterans Health Administration physicians and dentists by $20,000 to $35,000 annually.

Meanwhile, the Valley Native Primary Care Center is one of numerous providers to which the VA has referred patients. Hudson said that the LPN working at the clinic, though busy, has not reached the maximum 1,200 patients that a provider is allowed to have in the VA.

“She is not at the 1,200 mark,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.